NEWSPAPER COMICS "THE REPLACEMENTS"Page 6

NEWSPAPER COMICS "AND IN THE OTHER NEWS..."

Newspaper Comics & Strange Stories: Having been the subject of various
articles, interviews and essays over the years I have had a
reasonable amount of first hand experience with what I call the
information warp. This strange reality bending black hole sucks in
data twists in around, folds it on top of it self and even adds
elements of its own in order to split out predetermined fabrications
according to it's employers bias. These warps are generally hired by
mainstream media but can also be found working for alternative
publications. What tends to happen is that the higher up team up with
marketing research and decide ahead of time what kind of stories they
would like to report. The days of investigation and listening in on
police radio are long gone. These days the headline precedes the
story and the article is written before the investigation. The
final stage, research and interviews, is basically a formality in
which a few “realities” can be added to the script to make it
more credible. Of course when this sort of data is unavailable the
reporter calls upon the aforementioned information warp.

One example which stands out for me,
probably because it was the first time I heard of such things, was in
regards to an interview my father had done on television when I was
still quite young. I remember the newspapers and programs were
spouting all sorts of terrifying tales of recessions and poor
business. The exact details escape me but certain stock and bank
related issues were apparently foretelling the apocalypse. At this
time my father was employed by one of the major men's suits
companies. He worked in their giant downtown flagship location and
was the vice president of sales so he had a really good sense of the
how the business was doing. In the midst of all the horror stories
about the collapsing economy a television crew showed up at my
father's workplace asking about the store's financial situation. It
was nearing Christmas time and business was actually booming and my
father was excited to promote the companies good fortune. However
despite being recorded for fifteen minutes reciting the great sales
and positive outlook for the coming season when we watched the news
that evening it told a completely different tale. Only a few
sentences remained of my father's interview and they had been edited
to sound like the store was struggling. The segment continued to
report on the demise of civilization and used my father's prosperous
employer as a signifier of the end.

I have since had many encounter's with
the dreaded information warp but another incident which comes to mind
occurred more recently after I got a telephone request to be
interviewed by one of the city's major newspapers. The reporter was
told to write stories about people triumphing over personal battles.
Being aware that I started out as a street artist and was now
becoming reasonably successful the writer got the idea to use me as the
subject. Although there may or may not be an interesting story behind
my progress as an artist the interview questions were geared in such
a way as to fabricate a great struggle. For example my decision to
work as a street performer was a very decisive one, I wanted to
experiment with public performances and interact with people outside
of the gallery circuit. However the published article reported that I
had been ostracized by my family and society and left to die homeless on the sidewalks where I climbed my way out of the gutter by drawing pictures in the
streets. And so the information warp which inspired the inclusion of newspaper comics in my anthology had struck once again...